Engaged in Old-Fashioned Conversation

Having been driven into the basement of the local Presbyterian church by a Nebraska downpour, the walking contingent of the wagon train is commiserating about what a hard day’s work we’re going to have on tomorrow’s muddy roads.

As we list all the ways that the rain is going to cause us problems out there, Brent Moore and Amy Freestone come in out of the rain to announce their engagement. I wonder where Brent got a ring out here on the trail. Turns out Amy is showing off a “prairie diamond”--a horseshoe nail bent to fit a finger.

Amy and Brent met five weeks ago on the trail. Brent planned to walk the entire 1,000 plus miles of the trip after his recent graduation from Brigham Young University with a degree in biochemistry. Amy had come for only a few days, then decided to stay for the whole trip. Of all the tents in the walkers’ camp, (82 as of Saturday) they have the only two that match.

“It was the tents,” Brent says. “That’s what first attracted me to her--or her to me.” And things just sort of took off from there.

Fortunately for Brent, the rain let up for about half an hour this evening.

“We went across the fences, and we walked out in the tall grass, and all the meadow larks were singing,” he says matter-of-factly. “We stopped in the meadow, and I put down my bag, took off my hat and said, ‘Amy, there’s something I have to tell you. I called your dad last night.’ ”

“He stopped, and I was like, ohhhhh,” adds Amy, taking in a deep breath.

So he proposed, she accepted, and now we’re having an impromptu engagement party with canteen water, broken potato chips and s’mores.

The engagement is welcome but not surprising. Pete Petramalo, our resident matchmaker, had these two paired off the first day Amy came on the trail. But it emphasizes to us how the wagon train members have become a family.

After being out here, you really get to know a person. That process is not interrupted by the conveniences of our modern lives.

Though most of us think this engagement is not only perfect but also a long time coming, some people (those not in the Handcart Company) are surprised that after only five weeks Brent and Amy could know each other well enough to think that they could stand to be together permanently.

One man, who has been dating the same woman for three years, says, “They’ve known each other for five weeks; how can they think it will last?”

Well, we are together out here all day every day, with nothing to do but talk to each other. After about two days of nonstop talking, people have usually used up their supply of light chitchat and are left with nothing but elemental things to talk about.

So within a week you really know what kind of person you’re talking to. Is this person selfish? Adaptable? Easily upset or offended? Does this person know how to work? Is he or she kind?

After spending 16 or so hours a day interacting with each other under various situations, all of our virtues and faults are brought out for public view, so the normal pace of relationships is accelerated. That point where we were getting on each other’s nerves came and went in about the third week.

I’d say that after five weeks of life on the trail, Brent and Amy know each other far better than any couple that’s spent two years going to the movies twice a week.

*

At home you may be a writer, a recent biochemistry graduate, a retired Air Force technician, an IBM salesman, an interpreter for the deaf, a hairdresser, a husband, a student, a daughter or any of the other labels we use to tell other people (and ourselves) who and what we are.

Out here you are only a person among other people. Unless you came with other people, no one here knows whether you were a failure or a great success.

No one here knows how people generally react to you.

All engagements aside, this trip has been a demonstration of the reinvention of the self that the West has always symbolized to Americans. My own great-great-grandfather, James Lewis, speaks of the difference between his life in the East and in the West.

“My family held prominent positions, both civil and religious, in Massachusetts and in Maine,” he wrote. “I received a common school education--some of my brothers found better foreign education than myself. I followed the sea for a few years being of a roving disposition. . . . I went west, stopped in St. Loring, Missouri, found employment as a clerk.”

After wandering around as a sailor, hired hand and office worker, he met up with church members in Missouri and went west. They respected him so much for his work on the trail and in the development of the new settlements that they made him judge of the county.

In reading his memoirs, it is apparent that he was seen as a ne’er-do-well back home, and his family didn’t expect much of him.

But whatever his talents were that weren’t obvious in the East, out West they thought he was the greatest thing going.

*

We have people on this trip who I presume were not a big hit back home. But out here their particular combination of talents has served them and others well. Hopefully their newfound sense of usefulness will carry over when the trip is done.

We all will have adjustments to make when we get done with this trip. The sides of ourselves that we’ve developed here will have to meld into our everyday lives back home.

And of course, Amy and Brent will have adjustments to make and complications to overcome. But when the last mile has been walked, participants in this trip will know themselves and each other in a way that is difficult to duplicate in modern life.

* Kathy Stickel, 27, of Huntington Beach, is filing periodic reports from the Mormon Trail Wagon Train, which is retracing the 1,000-mile route of the Mormon migration from Iowa to Utah 150 years ago.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Prairie Diamond

As our ancestors walked to the

Promised Land,

Many of the youth walked hand

in hand.

Some fell in love and wanted

to marry,

But money and jewelry they

did not carry.

A kind young blacksmith

knew what to do,

He bent the nail from a old

horseshoe.

“The Prairie Diamond” was

the name he gave,

Many a marriage did he save.

--Author Unknown